⚔️ Taking the War Out of the Cognitive Field

⚔️ Beyond Clausewitz: Rethinking Security in a Post-Conventional Era — the deeper challenge underlying tomorrow’s Peace Talks in Budapest.

If the war launched by Vladimir Putin’s Russia against Ukraine were purely territorial, it could be settled through conventional means — an exchange of land, a ceasefire, or a neutral status guaranteed by treaties.

But this conflict has carried us a thousand light-years away from Clausewitz.
The Prussian strategist described war as “the continuation of politics by other means.”
Yet Russia has transformed it into something else entirely: the continuation of politics through the confusion of means.

The battlefield is no longer the Donbas — it is the human mind itself.
This war has migrated into the cognitive field: into narratives, perceptions, emotional manipulation, and the corrosion of collective discernment.

It now unfolds across the entire planet — through social networks, media ecosystems, political discourse, economic leverage, and even cultural production.
It seeks not conquest, but disorientation; not victory, but the erosion of trust and coherence within democracies.

Hence, traditional security guarantees are no longer sufficient.
They must evolve beyond the military domain to encompass:

• Cognitive protection of societies;
• Information-space integrity, against manipulative and hybrid operations;
• Psychological resilience within democracies;
• Institutional trust as a strategic asset.

Conventional war destroys bridges.
Cognitive war destroys the bridges between minds.

Taking the war out of the cognitive field means restoring the primacy of truth, reason, and politics over narrative manipulation.
It also means redefining security itself as a global public good —
for peace today is no longer merely the absence of war,
but the restoration of confidence in reality.

If the Budapest summit simply negotiates a territorial truce or freezes lines, we risk returning to a pre-Clausewitzian mindset. But if it boldly embraces this post-conventional dimension—saying: “We will rebuild the bridges between minds, not just the lines on maps”—it can mark a turning point in how the free world conceptualises war, peace and security.

President Vladimir Putin has already made clear — publicly and repeatedly — that Russia regards information operations as a legitimate and enduring instrument of statecraft. He used his address at the RT 20th-anniversary gala at the Bolshoi Theatre to praise RT’s role in challenging “monopolies” of narrative and to defend the idea of a louder Russian voice in the information space. Special Kremlin
That posture was reinforced in his Valdai Forum remarks, where he framed Western media and political moves as part of a wider confrontation and signalled Moscow’s intent to respond forcefully across political and informational domains. The Guardian

This is not a tactical quibble: it is existential. If the Budapest talks do not treat information warfare as a primary security dimension — and if they fail to secure concrete guarantees that the information domain will be demilitarised and neutralised — the conference will at best freeze a map and at worst leave the most dangerous front unconstrained. Therefore, it is vital, in terms of collective and even universal security, to crush this dimension in the egg: to make any peace settlement contingent on verifiable, enforceable mechanisms that eliminate state-led informational aggression and restore shared factual ground as the precondition for lasting peace.